


The Language of Flowers

by kmo



Category: The Queen's Thief - Megan Whalen Turner
Genre: Angst, Attolia POV, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-19
Updated: 2015-12-19
Packaged: 2018-05-07 16:53:25
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,964
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5463980
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kmo/pseuds/kmo
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Scent and memory in the life of Attolia Irene.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Language of Flowers

**Author's Note:**

  * For [stray_alchemist](https://archiveofourown.org/users/stray_alchemist/gifts).



She hates the smell of jasmine.

Jasmine is cloying. Jasmine lingers, overstaying its welcome like an unwanted guest.

Jasmine is the summer day, warm and sticky, when she had been visited by one of her father’s most trusted ministers. It’s the hurt and the flash of anger she couldn’t control. It’s being taken away from her light, comfortable room overlooking the queen’s garden and moved to unfamiliar quarters full of hard mahogany furniture and even harder floors. The looks on the faces of her new attendants are hard, too. Gone her beloved nurse, with her apple cheeks and strong arms. Gone her favorite dolls and games, replaced by heavy volumes of dry Attolian history.

Gone her brother, the prince-to-be.  Gone her safety. Gone her childhood.

When her new attendants try to braid gems into her hair, rubies befitting the heir to the realm and not an overlooked princess, Irene shouts for them to leave. They scurry beneath her wrath, and Irene tastes it then, a sip of power more potent than unwatered wine. For good measure she throws her slipper at the smallest of them; the girl ducks and it collides with a delicately painted amphora, her favorite.

The amphora breaks. Its heady perfume seeps into the carpet. Her attendants scrub on their hands and knees until their fingers bleed, but the stench will not come out.

The smallest attendant says, “I think it smells nice." She is immediately sent home in disgrace.

The carpet is replaced, but Irene still smells jasmine long after it’s gone. The perfume is a reminder that some things broken in haste can never be put back together again, not even by the Queen of Attolia.

*

There is no jasmine in the household of her betrothed. His father anoints his beard with a heavy sandalwood oil; he believes it gives him an aura of potency and masculinity. The men of his household follow suit. Forever after, Irene will associate sandalwood with the cooking smells of her betrothed’s hearth and the dangerous ambitions of weak-minded men.

She gets an unpleasant whiff of it one evening, when her betrothed, half-drunk, corners her roughly in the hallway and whispers all the things he plans to do to her once she is his wife, his property. The sandalwood mixed with the sour wine on his breath makes Irene want to vomit. She stays still and quiet, though inside anger flows like magma through her veins.

She, of course, wears no scent, save for the lavender the laundress uses to wash her clothes. A shadow princess should go unseen, unheard, unsmelled, colorless and odorless as befits a shadow.

The bright leaves of the coleus bush are odorless, too. 

*

The years following her coronation are a feast for the senses, so luxurious as to be obscene. Attolia bathes in waters perfumed with attar of roses and golden drops of myrrh. Her hair oil glistens with fragrant gardenia, carried by ship and caravan from beyond the Far East’s farthest shores. Her banquet table sags beneath the weight of rich roasts and candied fruits. Two tasters are employed to ensure that such delights do not mask a bitter poison.

Sandalwood falls out of fashion among those who would seek the queen’s favor and jasmine is expressly forbidden in her presence.

One evening as she slips beneath cambric sheets so fine as to be satin, Attolia notices a lone flower on her pillow. She quizzes her attendants and is disturbed when they swear to all the gods they did not place it there. The blossom is five-pointed like a star; its petals shade from the palest periwinkle at the edges to indigo near the stem, a drop of pearl white at its heart. Its leaves are covered in tiny silvery thorns that prick her when she touches them, invisible to the naked eye. Carefully, Attolia grasps the stem between thumb and forefinger and sniffs. The blue flower smells cool and sweet and it draws her in to sniff at it again and again. Its fragrance is a perfume she could wear day after day forever.

The enchanting smell of the flower frightens her a little—could it be some drug meant to intoxicate her, poison her? But minutes and hours pass and Attolia feels nothing save contentment and a slight longing to smell the flower again. She drifts off into sleep, the most pleasant and untroubled she has had since her brother died.

The next morning Attolia summons her Master Gardener to her chambers and asks him to identify the strange flower left on her pillow.

His tired eyes brighten when he spies it. “I never thought I’d see one in the flesh. May I, my queen?” Attolia nods and he grasps the flower between calloused but tender hands.

“You know this flower, Gardener?”

He twirls the blossom gently and takes a brief sniff. He smiles. “It grows only in Eddis, high atop the summit of their sacred mountain where the air is very thin. Hephestia’s Tears, they call it.”

Attolia wishes she could say she was surprised. “A fanciful name—the Great Goddess sheds no tears.”

“Indeed. It is a rare blossom and will suffer no greenhouse. They say the Eddisians give them to their sweethearts—it’s a symbol of great love and devotion.” The gardener’s large dark eyes tremble at the last, afraid of what he has said.

Inside Attolia seethes with rage. She longs for a slipper to throw. Instead she dismisses her gardener, swearing him to secrecy upon pain of death.

Attolia spends the rest of the morning sitting before her window, Hephestia’s Tears resting in her lap. She thinks of crushing the tiny flower in her palm, plucking its petals one by one until they are gone. She wonders how many other maidens have received such a blossom from the Thief. She wonders if he’s given one to Eddis.

She tries to imagine what it would be like to receive such a gift if she were just a goat herder’s daughter instead of Queen of Attolia. She finds she cannot imagine.

Attolia tucks the flower between the pages of a thick, dull volume on the Peninsular Wars, out of sight but not out of mind.

*

The screams and sobs of the Thief of Eddis echo inside her skull hours after she has left the dungeons for the comfort of her chambers. Her nostrils fill with the sticky-sweet smell of jasmine again, the contents of that delicate, beautiful amphora broken in haste long ago by a sad and angry girl.

It is no more possible she should be smelling jasmine than hearing the screams of the Thief through five floors of marble and granite. She had not even been in the same chamber since becoming queen. Ordering her attendants out of sight, Attolia uncorks every amphora and bottle in her possession—their scents are all abundantly rich and lovely, but none smell of jasmine.

She is marinating in her own madness. It’s not jasmine she smells, but the stench of her own heart and mind rotting away. What else could it be since she became a torturer of boys?

Attolia sinks on her bed and retrieves the leather-bound tome. The single blossom of Hephestia’s Tears is there, dried and flattened; its petals crinkle like old parchment. Eugenides had cried for Hephestia’s mercy, but his prayers had gone unanswered. The Great Goddess sheds no tears after all.

Attolia holds the fragile blossom in her hands and begins to weep.

*

The Thief returns to Eddis, but the stench of the perfume remains, a subtle madness to plague the queen. It’s the smell of overripe fruit rotting on the vine. She herself is the fruit—her body has long ago ripened, rosy as a pomegranate. Her first bloom was many years ago, and still Attolia goes untouched, unloved. She feels like a plant that is never watered. Surely she should have withered and died by now, but somehow she survives. The garden walls she has built around herself grow higher and thicker by the day and Attolia knows that one day soon they will grow so high as to block out the sun.

Weeks pass, and Attolia flits between the Mede ambassador who would swallow her kingdom whole and the treacherous barons who would rend it to pieces, dancing between the raindrops, all the while pressing her spies (and the spies who spy on her spies) for news of Eddis, news of the Thief.

Before her spies can confirm the Thief’s miraculous recovery, Attolia receives confirmation of a different sort. There on her night table, in the place where a gift of ruby earrings had once lain, is a star-shaped blue flower.

Does he mock her?

Does he wish to drive her mad?

If he thinks she will accept such a token, surely  _he’s_  the one who has gone mad.

Attolia picks up the flower and frowns. She should have crushed the flower and killed the boy. She folds her hand to crumple it, but cannot. She raises it to her nose and inhales. It smells like a mountain stream, clear and cold and pure. Its are petals the truest blue. 

In the morning, she gives the flower to her Master Gardener and orders him to experiment. She is curious to see if Eddisian seeds will thrive when planted in Attolian soil.

*

Harsh words trample on even harsher ones. They sharpen their tongues and wits on one another until Attolia can take it no more. She picks up a crystal inkwell from her desk and throws it at her husband. Were he anyone else but a quick-footed Thief, it would have connected soundly with his skull. She was not trying to miss.

There is the crack of shattered glass and the acrid smell of ink. Blue-black splotches streak down the wall like dark blood, staining the pale curtains and fine carpet. Her husband’s silence is deafening.

Broken glass, a broken amphora, and a broken man. Why must she make the same mistake over and over? Is she doomed to never learn?

It’s not until she feels Eugenides’ hand brushing away her tears that Attolia even realizes she’s crying. He draws her to his firm chest, and she starts to sob, so hard she is afraid she will not be able to stop. His hook rubs soothing circles along her back in a way that is both comforting and sinister; it is still more kindness than she deserves.

“It’s only an inkwell,” he says.

“I’m not crying over spilt ink.” She pushes away from him and her eyes flick treacherously toward his hook and the mangled stump within it.

“I know, Irene.” He kisses the crown of her hair. He does not offer his forgiveness and she does not ask for it.

“It is only…my heart is like a barren field where nothing can grow. You should not have married me.”

Eugenides looks back at her, sweetly, sadly. There are tiny blue flowers embroidered in silk along the stiff collar of his wedding clothes—Hephestia’s Tears—she had not noticed it before. He rests the flat curve of his hook underneath her chin and tilts her head up for a kiss. His lips brush hers again and again, coaxing her mouth open with gentle pressure until his tongue slips between her teeth with a shock that leaves her moaning. They have not kissed like this before, _she_ has never been kissed like this before. Something warm and honeyed blooms inside her pelvis and Attolia kisses him back, thirsting for every last drop.

Eugenides breaks their kiss, cheeks flushed and breath labored in a way that mirrors her own. He plants soft kisses from her jaw to her earlobe. “You’ll find I am a patient gardener,” he says.

**Author's Note:**

> I love this series and this pairing--thank you for giving me the chance to finally write something for them! Happy Yuletide!


End file.
